The clowns had earlier helped prepare free hot lunches before launching a musical parade through the camp.
Laurence Quotel and a clown colleague at the camp (Image: Facebook)
Red-nosed clowns juggled, paraded and high-fived through queues of migrants preparing to risk the English Channel crossing in small boats or mega-dinghies at Loon-Plage near Calais. Laurence Quetel, 67, a former Philips manager from the Netherlands performing as Clown Holalal, led the dungaree-clad troupe with aid group Salam Nord.
Their efforts to lift spirits among roughly 2,500 residents at the squalid, rat-infested site met with widespread bemusement and scarce smiles. Just 50 metres away, Kurdish people-smuggling gangs sat in tents plotting the next batch of Channel crossings. The clowns had earlier helped prepare free hot lunches before launching a musical parade through the camp. Similar scenes played out days earlier at the Jungle of Dunkirk, where Ms Quetel and colleague Elleke van Gemeren joined Salam volunteers.
New perimeter walls have lengthened the punishing walk to distribution points, forcing parents with children and pushchairs to trek further in heat or rain, reports The Telegraph. A few water taps, restored only after legal action by aid organisations against the French state, remain hopelessly inadequate.
Camp life is strictly controlled by gangs. One section is reserved for migrants and aid workers; the other for smugglers, who sell cigarettes, soft drinks and phone-charging services from ramshackle tents while cooking lamb kebabs and boiling tea. Violence is routine.
Last July a man in his 30s was shot seven times in a gang murder. A month earlier a double shooting left two dead and six wounded, including a woman and a two-year-old child. Aid groups are tolerated provided they ignore the criminal trade keeping the camp functioning.
Smugglers have turned to 15-metre “mega dinghies” capable of packing in 230 people at a time. Describing the vessels as a necessary evil, Ms Quetel said: “My first feeling was, I was happy that 230 people arrived in one batch without people dying… The second was s—, how can they put them on there.”
Migrants wait on a dinghy as they prepare to cross the English Channel (Image: Getty Images)
She added: “You hear so many horrible stories, you have women and their kids who are separated from their husbands. So no I am not happy with those big boats but if they did not have a big boat they could not go anywhere.”
She insisted she was doing something worthwhile, saying: “When I am here, I take a ball and I look at another pair of eyes, I suddenly know there is a communication where I can throw the ball, they take the ball and then I see the human being as an individual.
“This is a human thing and this is a beautiful thing to see. Despite all the hell they are going through, despite the rats, despite the fact they are treated like s***, if you just have that micro-second, suddenly we are all back together. And that makes me so happy because I am an old woman and I am conscious of the value of it.”
Migrants were more sceptical of the giant boats. Recoiling at a photograph of one vessel, Adam, 19, from Sudan, said: “Whoa, whoa that’s too dangerous, no no no.”
Reacting to the boats, Ali Faraj, 22, a Kurdish chef travelling with his 10-year-old brother, said they were “crazy.” Ahmed Hijazi, 32, from Gaza, said resignedly: “I would go [on the big boat]. What else can I do, I have no other option.”
The performance has drawn public questioning over the incongruity of red noses and juggling metres from organised crime. Online commentators and outlets including the Daily Sceptic described it as “a bizarre glimpse of the symbiotic relationship between aid workers and people-smugglers”, questioning the purpose of treating the pipeline to Britain as a feel-good project. Similar criticism surfaced in 2016 when another clown troupe performed in Dunkirk camps.
After the brief show, volunteers cleared the usual detritus of plastic, cans and discarded shoes. Ms Quetel plans to return later this month with colleagues under the name Cleaningfools.
For those still waiting for a boat, the red noses offered little more than a fleeting interruption to the daily grind of queues, squalor and the next attempt to reach Britain.